The computer system for a company called RBS WorldPay was hacked. One service of the company is the ability for employers to pay employees with the money going directly to a card, called payroll cards, a lot like a debit card that can be used in any ATM. The hacker was able to infiltrate the supposedly secure system and steal the information necessary to duplicate or clone people’s ATM cards.

Then shortly after midnight Eastern Time on November 8, the FBI believes that dozens of the so-called cashers were used in a coordinated attack of ATM machines around the world.
“Over 130 different ATM machines in 49 cities worldwide were accessed in a 30-minute period on November 8,” Agents Rice said. “So you can get an idea of the number of people involved in this and the scope of the operation.”

Not Peter Gutmann’s 35 pass which will take like 2 months to complete on an 1TB hdd. I always thought that 1-3 passes is just enough to make any long enough sequence of important bytes unrecoverable and here or here you can find proof.

Yes that’s right, a full blown Linux distribution. It will be based on debian base packages with ubuntu repositories integration. I am pretty glad about this because it will make Backtrack much more comfortable to use as an installed Linux distribution on hdd. What exactly do i mean by comfortable:

up-to-date kernel

package updates

security updates

easy installation of new packages/applications

All of this summarizes in just two words package-management which is very important for a day to day usage of an installed on disk Linux distribution and keeps you mentally and physically in great form. 😈

You can read more about this transition to a full blown distribution here and here and yes it’s “official” because it comes from muts.

ESET SysInspector is a free diagnostic tool for Windows which takes a snapshot of your core Windows system components and then applies some analysis and heuristics on the data gathered, assigns a risk level of each object in every component and then presents you with the results. It’s good both for security and general system analysis.